Inspired by Tyler McIntosh’s article The Camping Crunch: Camping’s rise in popularity on America’s public lands1, I decided to use the same data set from recreation.gov2 to look at camping dynamics in North Carolina, where I live.
I wondered, in North Carolina …
First one must check: what’s in the data, and are there any important limitations? I found five:
recreation.gov mostly processes reservations for federal facilities. It does not process reservations for state-owned public campgrounds in North Carolina. NC State Parks use ReserveAmerica.com instead, thus the campgrounds closest to my home in the Jordan Lake State Recreation Area and my favorite at Mount Mitchell are not included in this data set. As noted at https://www.ncparks.gov/find-a-park :
There are 41 places that are currently part of the North Carolina State Parks system: 34 parks, four recreation areas, and three staffed state natural areas.
Some campsites are not reservable, and some may not be reservable in the off season. So by definition, use of these sites will not show up in this data set.
Some campsites have become reservable during the years covered in this data set. For example, the NPS campgrounds at Cape Hatteras: Oregon Inlet and Frisco started taking reservations in 2015, and Cape Point started in 2016. Including these campgrounds unduly inflates the mulit-year growth rate.
As is visible in the per-campground trend data starting with camping person-nights by park, there are a lot of outliers in the data in 2018, 2019, and 2020. Thus I have varied the end year as I saw fit to communicate trends most clearly. Likely there are two causes to these anomalies:
Data for 2018 and first half of 2019 are less reliable than other years as explained in the 2018 history readme:
Due to the transition between Rec.gov vendors the FY 2018 historical reservation data has not been fully verified for accuracy and completeness.
In 2020 due the the COVID-19 pandemic, people changed their behavior significantly, and camping facilities were closed for some periods of the year. For example, I assume that group campsites were used less frequently, and group size was smaller than earlier years.
As noted at trailandsummit.com the definition of “standard”, “tent” and “RV” overlap, which means counts and trends below that distinguish among these categories would not reflect the experience of campers, for example, in the availability of a campsite for them:
In most campgrounds, the term “standard campsite” is interchangeable with a “basic campsite.” Like basic sites, standard campsites usually have a driveway, a picnic table, and a fire ring or grill, and are normally reserved for groups of 6 people or less. Depending on the type of campground, standard sites may be suitable for tents or RVs, though they’re mostly used by tent campers. This is because most standard sites have driveways that are only suitable for smaller campers and campervans. That being said, in RV-only campgrounds, standard campsites may refer to a site where you get everything listed above, plus a simple electric hookup, but no water or sewer.
Given there are no RV-only campgrounds among these federally-owned facilities in NC, I am recognizing all “standard” sites as “tent” sites.
So setting aside the NC State Park system, I focus here on federal facilities in NC, which amidst the oddities of 2020 provided 785,845 person-nights of camping and collected $3,369,447 in overnight camping fees.
For the sake of brevity, I refer to the facilities as campgrounds with campsites even though some are cabins, lodges, lookouts, and shelters.
There are 46 federal facilities in North Carolina offering reservations through recreation.gov, which I consolidated from 56 separate facility_id values (some parks record cabins or group campgrounds with separate facility ids).
A summary table can be found in Appendix 1 NC facility summary
The following federal agencies offer overnight camping with reservations via recreation.gov:
| Federal agencies offering overnight camping reservations in NC via recreation.gov |
|||
|---|---|---|---|
| org_name | n_facilities | org_abb | org_url |
| USDA Forest Service | 31 | FS | http://www.fs.fed.us |
| National Park Service | 22 | NPS | http://www.nps.gov |
| US Army Corps of Engineers | 3 | USACE | http://www.usace.army.mil |
Parks are nearly all in the mountains in the West or at coast in the East.
About half the campgrounds have at least 50 campsites:
These facilities provided nearly 7 million person-nights of camping 2009-2020.
Some notes:
person_night is one person camping one night. So if four people camp on a Friday and Saturday night, that’s 8 person_nights. Based on personal experience organizing group camping events for Scouts, I think person-night counts for group sites are probably less accurate than the others (but likely within 10% of actual).feature_id values for each site_type offered. Some have slightly different names, for example, I have combined Cataloochee Group Camp + Cataloochee Horse Camp + Cataloochee Campground into one facility_name with a common facility_id_group.facility_id_group, n_sites is a count of distinct product_id values. I assume that, in general, product_id values have not changed over time, and the same value is not used for multiple campsites at the same facility. This is not quite true, resulting in counts of camping sites in NC varying by up to 7%, depending how you count. For my purposes here this doesn’t matter. Details are in Appendix 1 There is some reuse of product_id values (unfortunately).As discussed in Appendix 1 Reservable sites added during the years of interest, Some recorded growth is due to more inventory added to the recreation.gov reservation system, which inflates the growth rate. How much? In 2019 it was 36% of all person_nights.
In year-based comparison views, I provide both views.
As seen in (B) the growth started after 2014 and mostly occurred in tent camping. Why? There is nothing in the data that answers this question.
The number of yearly person-nights has been increasing in most parks:
Part 1:
NC camping person-nights per year by campground (part 1)
Part 2:
NC camping person-nights per year by campground (part 2)
Likewise camping revenue has been increasing in most parks, with 2020 being an anomaly for many of them.
Part 1:
NC camping revenue per year by campground (part 1)
Part 2:
NC camping revenue per year by campground (part 2)
Defining the summer season to be the four months May 15 to Sep 15, one can see that most camps are busiest during the summer. And while the number of camping person-nights has increased year-round, for most campgrounds, more of the growth has been during the summer:
Part 1:
NC seasonal camping person-nights per year by campground (part 1)
Part 2: